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Best way to make a satelite image background ground poly

Messages
247
Country
netherlands
Hello all,

I recently acquired satellite imagery that I will use for my airport background. For clarity's sake, and to omit blurries, I want it to be a ground poly. My question is about the best way to divide this massive texture into square chunks that P3D can use? Tutorials in Sketchup showed that you can make a rectangle and apply the sat image as material (so far so good), and then there was a tool to slice the rectangle. This somehow also sliced the texture, and through a popup menu the user was able to save the one, big texture, now as smaller individual textures. later MCX was able to make these textures into textures with dimensions at a power of 2, for use in P3D.

I was wondering if Blender can do something similar? Otherwise I theorized I can probably make a rectangle in blender, loop-cut it into just as many sections as needed to obtains sections smaller than 4096x4096. My thought was then to go into photoshop, upsample the tetxure so that the dimensions are a power 2, and then 'section' it into as many sections as the rectangle in blender. Then save the resulting squares, make new materials in Blender, and apply the separate textures I made in photoshop to the sectioned rectangle in Blender. This method is partly based on something I saw in a Youtube video a while ago, but they were making a tiny airfield and not a regional airport, thus they a smaller sat image to work with (still seemed like a hell of a job though)

The reason I don't like this method is because it'll require a ton of manual labor, whereas Shetchup's way seemed easy, quick and automated. I was wondering if anybody here has a method that's better than this? Preferably requiring less manual copy pasting and file saving...

Thanks,
Benjamin
 
Messages
247
Country
netherlands
Thanks for the suggestion Ronald, I've watched several of Austin's videos in the past but can't remember seeing one that deals specifically with a sat image ground poly. To be clear, I'm not looking fo a tutorial on making taxiways and lines etc, just want to know the best way to make the satellite background image as a poly rather than the default photoreal imagery. Specifically, how to do this in Blender.
 
Messages
210
Country
germany
You can find this in wiki:
Gmax ground poly: How to eliminate lines between each polygon

A lot of work, but to place the image is similar in blender. Calculate coordinates and size of the polygon (you can see from Austin or look for captain K-Man, but not the new way he tried). Then cut it into pieces (sure, size of 2) and do the same with the image. Export the textures and add them to blender. Not so difficult. But be aware, the usual way to make groundpoly with resample.exe let you use the PAPI lights from FSX/P3D. If you do not make holes in your blender polygons, you must create your own PAPI lights. And the FS9 code would not work for this in P3D.
For one project I made this with gmax. It was really a lot of work. And if you calculate wrong, everything is for nothing. I will never do this again. Possible, but too much work.
 
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Messages
247
Country
netherlands
Thanks Peter, much appreciated. My take-away from your post is that it really *does* have to be all manual work... I was hoping Blender can do something like SketchUp, where it automatically slices the texture and allows you to save the sliced texture to separate files. Oh well. Off to Photoshop I go! :)

I will say that with the release of P3Dv4.4 I'm wondering how useful it is to make a groundpoly like this, rather than just sticking with the 'basic' photoreal background that you refer to. After all, with 4.4 the textures appear wonderfully crisp, so that the original reason to make the ground poly rather than use the photoreal background falls away... Perhaps I'll stick with the regular photoreal background rather than go through the trouble of making a special ground poly. Also solves issues of season switching and the ground poly not adapting to elevation differences in the terrain.
 
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